New York to San Francisco

...is the perfect route for a proper high speed or maglev train service.

The South Korean government is planning, when their re-unification eventually occurs, a line from Seoul to Moscow. I met the chap planning it.

on Jun 4, 1876 the "Transcontinental express" did NY to SF in 83 hours, coal fired and hand stoked. Today it takes over 140. Doesn't sound like progress to me. The rail distance is something like 3,400 miles. Were that all French TGV standard it would take around 17 hours. The technology to get that below 10 hours is either known or imminent. For heavens sake, the old British Rail 225 sets from the late 1980s could do it in 22 hours, at least a few times. Virgin's Pendolinos could do it in 27, although It might take longer as I think they might have to stop for a lube break at some point!

By the time fossil fuels expire we might be very pleased to take 24 hours for a journey that would take 4 to 6 months on foot.

I'll get me coat. It probably still has a 1968 combined volume in the pocket.

Re: My thoughts

Re: Solar - oh FFS

I've been travelling around the world for around 5 decades, am old enough to have flown in a scheduled route in a Dakota and a DeHavilland Rapide.

And I'm about sick of it. My fervent hope is that we can't find a replacement for fossil fuels and have to go back to travelling by sailing ship, a genuinely civilised form of transport which doesn't involve being groped by security staff every 14 yards through the port.

Re: Never ever, EVER again

I had a 6340 as a replacement for my failed and much missed palm V. I grew to quite like the idea of a phone, PDA, camera, and music player all in one.

The problem was the damn thing didn't work. I had to reboot it several times a day, cold boot it a couple of times a week, and could not depend on it ringing when someone wanted to talk to me, or knowing where my contact list was when I wanted to talk to someone else. Even the idea of syncing with the supplied copy of outlook was beyond it.

Re: "Stylophone" Love it! Now there is a blast from the past.

Hello, this is 1980

We had this idea back then. "Expert systems" would be created to encapsulate the best practice of the finest [Doctors|Surgeons|Engineers|Financiers] to assist the less able. Died a death then, I suggest it will again.

Re: Actually

Not always fortunate - there were dead periods where I was reduced to doing red&blue tape PCB artworks on the kitchen table. Or plugging new cash register printers in at Tesco after midnight.

I'm just saying that people should make their own choices. Maybe if I had been different I'd still be in charge of an R&D department instead of using a screwdriver and a torque wrench on a daily basis. Maybe I'd have earned more. But I earned enough, and can live with having designed control systems in the food and printing industry.

I'm not sure that people do work on weapons systems without a certain amount of introspection: I know a few who did exactly that. I rather think this chap's advice is null. I think that most designers and developers know very well what they are doing. it would all get smelly very quickly if they didn't.

Re: Not another one!

Even before the EMV connector was widely used on cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV) the banks issued and maintained a PIN system used all over at least europe and south america. Terminals had to be complient and approved, and were often issued by the banks: but there was a standard that they all more or less agreed to.

I have been using swipe-and-pin terminals since the late 1980s, and chip-and-pin since the early years of this century. I don';t think I have had a card mag-swiped outside the USA since around 2003. Even in Malawi, China, and The Andaman islands shops, cash machines, and banks all work with the chip-and-pin method. Damnm, I designed a swipe-and-pin terminal back in 1976, when the banks wanted to maintain separate PIN algorithms.